Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

An anonymous reader writes "In December, porn.com started accepting Bitcoin for its premium services, and the virtual currency quickly came to account for 10 percent of sales. At the start of January, a post on Reddit's Bitcoin subforum boosted the figure to 50 percent, before settling down to about 25 percent. The tremendous interest has led David Kay, the marketing director at porn.com's parent company Sagan, to talk very positively about the virtual currency: 'I definitely believe that porn will be Bitcoin's killer app,' he told The Guardian. 'Fast, private and confidential payments.'"

Depends what you mean by better tech. Betamax traded picture quality for running time. VHS had longer running tapes that you could fit an entire movie on from day one. Betamax didn't get that till later. Sony probably made the tapes too short for a movie deliberately as a form of DRM (that's a joke)

You joke, but I'm not so sure there may not be some element of truth in that. When the specs for the audio CD were being thrashed out CBS/Sony president (and later CEO and chairman) Norio Ohga all but forced Philips into changing the format to accomodate his favourite piece, Beethoven's 9th Symphony, in its entirety. Before the change to 12cm diameter disks, Philips had been proposing 11.5cm and a playing time of one hour exactly, but the longest running version of Beethoven's 9th was Furtwangler's 1951 Bayreuth Festival recording at 74 minutes, requiring the extra 0.5cm. If Sony's audio division could use the length of pieces to dictate technology specs, then why not the video division?

Philips had been proposing 11.5cm and a playing time of one hour exactly, but the longest running version of Beethoven's 9th was Furtwangler's 1951 Bayreuth Festival recording at 74 minutes, requiring the extra 0.5cm.

So, just to bring this back on topic: What you're saying is that the size of your Furtwangler[*] DOES matter?

I actually tend to side with Snopes [snopes.com], "Status undetermined" on this, and we'll probably never know for certain. That said, a lot of the key components of the story are demonstrably true, making for an awful lot of coincidences that all add credibility to it, including a retelling on Philips' own website and marketing materials of the time specifically mentioning the Furtwangler recording. Here's a link [uni-essen.de] to a story by one of Philips' own engineers on the development process, documenting a sudden (and quite drastic) design change from Sony that had to have been triggered by something. All in all, I think there probably is some truth behind it, but were it a court of law most of the "evidence" would probably be classed as circumstantial, and I also suspect it may have been exaggerated after the fact by the marketing departments of Sony and Philips; it's a nice story, after all.

If they really wanted to put more music onto a single disc, the easier way would have been to encode the audio's amplitude on a logarithmic scale rather than linear. The current CD format is linear in amplitude and wastes a lot of bandwidth by recording very fine grades of amplitude differences in very loud sounds, not enough for very quiet sounds. Digital telephony uses logarithmic encoding because it's such an easy way to reduce bandwidth.

At the time CDs were released, computing power and DAC circuitry was still a costly commodity ("digital telephony" was not a widespread technology). Fancier encoding schemes such as logarithmic data representations might store more data, but they would also be significantly harder to implement in hardware. Early CD players were already fairly expensive; jacking up the cost would only slow adoption even more (even with longer-playing discs).

No extra processing would have been required. ADCs and DACs at the time already supported a-law and u-law encoding for telephone systems which essentially allow 12+ bits of dynamic range to be encoded into 8 bits.

Now could an accurate higher resolution converter with a logarithmic transfer curve could have been produced? I doubt it and if it could, so what? It would only have saved about 4 bits at the cost of not being able to use existing linear converters.

If they really wanted to put more music onto a single disc, the easier way would have been to encode the audio's amplitude on a logarithmic scale rather than linear. The current CD format is linear in amplitude and wastes a lot of bandwidth by recording very fine grades of amplitude differences in very loud sounds, not enough for very quiet sounds. Digital telephony uses logarithmic encoding because it's such an easy way to reduce bandwidth.

Logarithmic encoding gains dynamic range at the expense of increased distortion, and makes dithering more difficult. It's acceptable for voice, because distortion doesn't affect intelligibility much, but is unacceptable for music. Without dithering, 8-bit linear sounds severely distorted (think Amiga, Sega Genesis, etc). With dithering most of that distortion goes away and becomes a quite audible hiss, about on par with bad compact cassette at 44.1kHz. At 12-bit it sounds more like good compact cassette wit

VHS had a simpler tape path, too. A Betamax machine needed to unspool the tape 3/4 around the head drum, and had other mechanisms that needed the tape to move out, too. If something went wrong, despooling the tape became problematic. VHS, on the other hand, spooled tape out in a "M" fashion: two arms pulled the tape out and achieved a 1/2 wrap of the drum head. Because of that pattern, if the tape failed to retract getting it out wasn't as hard.

Serviceability played a major part in VHS winning the format wars, too. If you needed to replace a Betamax head, you needed all sorts of aligning jigs, test tapes and oscilloscopes to make sure the head was in exactly the right position. VHS heads, on the other hand, simply required 4 wires desoldered, the head lifted off with a single tool, the new head being slid into position and those 4 wires soldered back on. 10 min job with a quick clean + cost of head; easy money.

In truth, Betamax wasn't that much better than VHS in terms of signal quality. Betamax put a high frequency "ring" in the signal when there were abrupt changes in the luminance signal. This gave the appearance of a higher definition, as the edges seemed sharper than they actually were. VHS simply blurred the same scene.

Depends what you mean by better tech. Betamax traded picture quality for running time. VHS had longer running tapes that you could fit an entire movie on from day one. Betamax didn't get that till later. Sony probably made the tapes too short for a movie deliberately as a form of DRM (that's a joke)

That was before Sony became a content provider. It was also when Sony made good stuff, easily worth the price premium over its competitors.
Sony's downfall corresponds to about the time they got involved in the movie and music production buisness.

Though I tend to be sceptical of skeptics. They tend to reason things through with evidence until it is close enough to supporting what they want to believe, and then stop. Often there are subtle issues they have missed, or they have oversimplified things, or made unwarranted (though reasonable sounding) conclusions in their arguments that, on closer inspection, do not hold. Take skeptics with a dose of salt: be skeptical of their claims and let them convince you. I hope a good skept

Currently the business model of most porn websites is based on subscriptions and not on pay per view. A large part of their customers do most likely not even use their product but have just forgot/don't bother to cancel the subscription. Currently there is no way to set up such automatically recurring payments with bitcoin.

Why would a porn company willingly throw away all these paying users that don't actually use anything (i.e. don't cause them any costs)?

You laugh, but someone has already combined the Oculus Rift with something like the Novint Falcon [novint.com] attached to a strap around the crotch to create a sex simulator (anime-themed, of course, so probably a Japanese company.) I'd search for the video of it in action, but I'm at work so it would probably be a Bad Idea.:)

Throw a Fleshlight in there somewhere with a stable (and modular, for various positions) housing and, boom, you're a step or two below a holographic sex bot as seen in something like The 7th Day.

I fail to see how Bitcoin is private and confidential. All the transactions are public (inherently by design). And if you buy bitcoins somewhere with your CC or paypal or bank, it is possible to link the bitcoins to your name.

If you buy them with cash, you could as well buy one of those cash coupons that porn sites might accept too. Then, you gain TRUE anonymity and, as a bonus, you and the seller avoid the massive volatility of the currency (100x decrease/increase in value over a day).

It's muh more private and confidential thaan anything other than cash. In it's default form, you buy some bitcoins. Only the exchange knows the information to link your bitcoin wallet to your credit card, so someone has to get the exchange to part with the information.

I might not be a registered user, but I've been a Slashdot regular for years. The overall decline of quality of submissions is nothing new, but this particular one puts me over the edge. Recently, Slashdot's become only worth it for the comments, but as even this section's become practically unreadable (and I'm not even talking about the changes to the layout), I guess I owe you a quick final goodbye as I proceed remove Slashdot from my RSS reader in favor of multiple, more specialized news sources.

I'm a cypherpunk. (On a good day, I might describe myself as a cryptographer if it's simpler to, but emphasise my slightly different fields of experience compared to my peers. I hang around a lot of cryptographers.)

I work in porn (fetish porn, both behind, and in, the scenes, and yes, it's risk-aware, consensual kink, and our content is legal both here and in the US and most other places).

I strongly agree. We've been looking into accepting payments in BTC for some time. We hope to go live soon.

You have no idea - unless you also run an adult site! - just how much we hate payment processors, and just how much payment processors hate us. At best, we tolerate each other as a necessary evil business partner. But at worst...

They censor us. There is plenty of legal content that we cannot publish because if we do, they will pull service from us. (Sure, because that's what this industry needs - MORE censorship?!) They apologise profusely and say that this is because of Visa or MasterCard's rules, not their fault. Yet Visa and MasterCard claim to some that they do not have these rules, and to others the opposite. A large porn site based in California definitely gets to post content that we, not based in the US, definitely do not, even though it's totally legal in both our countries. It's not the large site's fault: they're doing the best they can and I appreciate their competition. I just wish we got a fairer deal, and I know the US State Department is heavily involved somewhere in all that mess. Wonderful. That's all we need. Fucking diplomats. (Actually, no, that might be a cool idea. Putting that in the notebook.)

They blame us for chargebacks. They apparently hate porn because they get chargebacks from people who buy porn, and then get buyer's remorse: jealous spouses, or something. Nope, not seeing that. That's not been our experience with our customers. We've only had 2 chargebacks from customers, ever. Our paying customers are very happy and enthusiastic about our content, which means we must be doing something right. Yay.

They blame us for card fraud. We have a very low rate of card fraud: lower than companies who sell computer parts. And it's easy to see why. If people want to steal our content they don't have to steal credit cards to get it. They just pirate it: it gets reposted on tumblr or sex.com or Bittorrent or RedTube or PornHub, or anywhere else, really. We KNOW that, of course: and we can either spend our time chasing around taking it down, or we can spend our time making more porn: I don't know about you, but I prefer the latter. There isn't anything we can do about piracy except hope they keep the watermarks and people see it, like it, decide they want more of our content, and come to our site and buy some, and so, it becomes promotional material. Is it sustainable? That's a business model problem. It is for us, right now. Though plagiarists who remove watermarks from stuff, or put their own on it? They can fuck off - that's just rude, and that's coming from a Pirate Party member. (Well, there's nothing we can do about it that doesn't involve being massive arseholes to potential customers - Prenda Law can eat a dick for giving our industry a bad name by using porn piracy as an excuse for outright blackmail!) You can't pirate computer parts (unless they've gotten REALLY good at 3D printing while I wasn't looking!). Result: we don't get carders, computer companies do.

Sure Bitcoin's value fluctuates compared to currency. Sure interchanges between hard currency and Bitcoin will likely be regulated (Bitcoin itself, of course, cannot be regulated in any useful manner). But the option to potentially remove a payment processor which is ultimately based in the US from the chain is a HUGE win. We can even pay our hosting and DNS directly with Bitcoin now. There are some things in life that hashcash can't buy. For everything else, there's Bitcoin. =)

It's not anonymous in the sense that it absolutely can't be tracked. Hell, the blockchain is public, and the US Govern

Sure Bitcoin's value fluctuates compared to currency. Sure interchanges between hard currency and Bitcoin will likely be regulated (Bitcoin itself, of course, cannot be regulated in any useful manner)...........It's not anonymous in the sense that it absolutely can't be tracked. Hell, the blockchain is public, and the US Government, with FINTRAC, can most definitely see the money going in and/or out. (See above re: regulation.)

This is just one of the many paradoxes with Bitcoin. As you say, public percepti

So how, exactly, is this a killer app? Bitcoin is still just a fancy barter token (and I don't see anything that will change that). Anyone with intelligence will still buy BTC and spend them ASAP or recieve BTC and convert them ASAP. Etc... etc...

Most people only care that the persons they deal with daily don't know about their porn habits. And if you are not prominent, you can be fairly sure that no one does an extensive investigation on it, especially if they don't have any suspicion otherwise. I wouldn't expect it to be anonymous to the police or the NSA, so I certainly wouldn't use it for illegal stuff (well, I wouldn't do anyway, but the point is, even if I were doing such stuff, I certainly would not use bitcoin for it).

Not really, no. Who would even read their posting? Who would even care?

Maybe in some Taliban-controlled country it could be a problem, but I doubt they're buying much internet porn over there.

Oh, you'd be surprised. Several years ago, a friend of mine worked in Iraq doing computer forensics on computers taken from Islamic whack jobs. One of his jobs was to watch all the porn videos looking for other video that might have been embedded in it. There was a lot of it. It wouldn't surprise me if there's plenty of porn on Taliban computers.

Several years ago, a friend of mine worked in Iraq doing computer forensics on computers taken from Islamic whack jobs. One of his jobs was to watch all the porn videos looking for other video that might have been embedded in it.

A few experts years ago found an effective way to detect commonly used forms of stenography in jpegs, and tried feeding two images from ebay through the detector, plus another million from usenet. Not a single one had any stenographic information that they could find, and their detector was demonstrated as very reliable.http://www.citi.umich.edu/u/provos/papers/detecting.pdf [umich.edu]

The NSA leaks did reveal that they have an interest in porn though: They've been mo

The transactions are public, but also hard to follow - most of the wallets are transitory. The path of payment for a typical porn purchase might go something like this:Buyer buys coins from exchange.Coins go from exchange to buyerBuyer spends them on porn, via a one-use payment address.Coins are transferred from there on to an exchange again to get dollars with.

So identifying a coin purchaser would need to know:1. A coin the purchaser owns at the time. This could be found out by an insider at the coin-for-dollars exchange, or by someone giving coin to a publicly posted address.2. Confirmation that the one-use payment address is being used to pay for porn. As it's a one-use address, only someone inside the porn distribution company or the exchange could know this. Unless the company mixes all their payments into a single pool prior to dollar-conversion.

So it could be done, but it's not trivial. You'd need someone inside the exchange willing to compromise confidentiality, which is the same thing you'd need to compromise conventional finance.

You actually have some evidence that most purchases are from one-time use wallets?

Also, the money has to go into the wallet somehow. This would mean they would buy the exact amount of bitcoins they needed for that particular transaction and that then goes into the wallet they intend to use for that transaction and then delete the wallet. I think that is too short-term for most bitcoin users. Who in their right mind would buy bitcoins day by day as needed? When the value fluctuates so wildly?

Not from. To. That's how merchants confirm who is paying for what. So you can find out a celebrities bitcoin wallet address and see how much they have in there, and you can see them spend the money... somewhere. But you can't tell who got it, unless they gave it to someone else who published their address.

It'd be easier to tell if they donated to a tip jar though. I can imagine that with easier payments some porn sites might use that business model - come, look at the porn and ads, and if you like it throw

If you do want to keep your wish secret the BitCoin is not the payment method for you. All transactions are public and even if you use secondary accounts it's not hard to trace back to your primary one.

As someone working in the business: no, video on demand isn't all that big. (Big enough, for it not to be ignored, but not exactly all that interesting) What seems to work best is live shows. People (well, mostly men) are willing to pay for that.

Bitcoin doesn't have an elemental unit as such. Most people now thing in micro-bitcoins, because a single coin is worth too much for everyday use, but that's just an arbitary shift of the decimal point.

Given that a Satoshi is 10^-8 bitcoins, what you are saying is, the value of a Bitcoin has fallen below 70 million dollars. I don't think anybody ever traded one bitcoin for such a high price.

The value of a Bitcoin has not fallen below 70 million dollars, it was never that high in the first place.
The value of a Satoshi has not fallen below 70 cents, it was never that high in the first place.

Can this stupid Ponzi scheme just crash and burn NOW so we stop seeing all the Slashvertisment for it?

Fuck Bitcoin.
Fuck "cryptocurrency" in general.

It's a damn pipe dream (something for nothing), and we'll all be better off when people wise the fuck up.

While I generally agree with your sentiments porn could solve one of bit coins serious shortcomings, illiquidity. If enough people buy Bitcoins that will introduce enough real currency into the system that it becomes a viable way to conduct payments.

It doesn't address the volatility issue, however; which really causes issues for both sides of the transaction but especially the content provider. Exchanges would need to convert at whatever the daily rate was when the purchases were made. exchanges could time

So you are going from saying "it's a currency" over and over to "it's a stock" because the marks are not buying the currency line?Personally I see it like a limited edition run of "My Little Pony" plates or similar thing that gets traded between collectors. The interest of the collectors is the only thing that gives it value. The people behind it and involved in the trading need to stir up the interest of more potential collectors if they want the thing to maintain or increase in value. The crypto angle

A currency is meant as an enabler of trade, it is not a commodity in and of itself but is rather intended to be temporarily held until you exchange it for something else. Indeed, holding on to most currencies is an extremely poor investment because inflation will gradually reduce their value.

A currency has value because you can use it to buy goods, services, and trade it for other currencies. There are many sites now such as the one mentioned in this article which will exchange goods or services for bitcoins, and there are several advantages to paying for services using bitcoins over other forms of payment.

Porn may tip the favor for a particular coin but there is one market that can make Bitcoin or any given altcoin an huge (relative to current) market.

Marijuana is a Schedule I drug no matter what any State's laws say. This Federal classification means that banks cannot do direct business with dealers, transporters, processors or growers of it. Several [psmag.com] publications [time.com] have covered this problem.

People in the trade are either working in very grey banking situations or dealing with large amounts of cash. Having to pay your $20,000 taxes this quarter with a duffle bag of twenties is a perfect situation for robbery.
Pot dispensaries on Colorado, USA are starting to figure out that they don't need banks to deal with Bitcoin or other altcoins. Right there could be a real Business-to-Business revolution [ibtimes.com] for digital currency.

Sure, today a digital coin is mostly useful for transactions. A business would have to convert between cash and coin at the ends. And even when you can go bitcoin from customer to suppliers for your business you'll still need to get out cash.

However, nothing you say even implies your last statement has validity. I first properly realised "what money really is" less than 10 years ago when I started reading about gold and monetary systems and the parent is completely correct (and already +5!). It is simply an enabler of trade. Anything can be used, as long as the buyer and seller have trust in the tokens used. Clay pellets also work. In today's society we have governments that want their piece of the ac

And unless you're one of those borderline obsessed people who have to collect every single video or photo of their favorite porn star, sending them gifts [amazon.com] and whatnot...Paying for it is simply not the path of least resistance.

FFS... whenever I use someone else's computer, without all the add blockers I have on my own, I can't seem to open a torrent search engine without being recommended at least a window or two of porn.It has come down to it that the path of lesser resistance for NO porn practically does no

Bitcoin is not a pyramid. A pyramid is a scheme where a few at the top depend on a large base to keep it going. Bitcoin is a peer to peer system like BitTorrent. Hard to believe you got a score of 5 Insightful for such a non-insightful comment.

A pyramid is a scheme where a few at the top depend on a large base to keep it going

Precisely. The initial perpetrators designed it so that a large base would artificially increase the value of what they are sitting on. It is deflationary by design and a textbook pyramid ponzi scheme.

You may not like bitcoin, but it isn't a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme takes money from new investors to make fake payments to the existing investors and fails as soon as there aren't enough new players to keep the scheme running. None of that matches bitcoin.

Bitcoin is a method of exchange. Some people take bitcoin directly in exchange for goods or services, some people accept it indirectly though a service that converts it to another currency for them. Gold is the best historical analogue and it'd be j

Bitcoin is a pyramid. There are a total of about 21 million bitcoins which can be mined. The easier ones are mined first, leaving the harder ones to be mined later, forming a pyramid of mining rate. About 11 million have been mined so far, so we are about halfway up the pyramid.

It is not a pyramid scheme in the traditional sense, where the addition of new members directly props up older members. But its design causes the same thing to happen, just indirectly. You don't seriously believe bitcoins wil

Bitcoin is nearly opposite of a pyramid scheme in a mathematical sense. Because Bitcoins are algorithmically made scarce, no exponential benefit is derived from introducing new users to use of it. There is a quantitative benefit in having additional interest or demand, but this is in no way exponential.

You missed the third option of somebody being pissed off about an old scam modified to be baited for geek and seeing articles pumping it to search for fresh meat on a geek site.So no more slow than herbivores taking care when the carnivores are prowling around.